Blood Brothers
by Alleyprowler
Summary: You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers. An introspective look at what it means to be part of the 'second family'. 14, nonyaoi.
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but the story is.  
Title: Blood Brothers, part 1/2  
Warnings: Language, blood, TWT and canon (mixed), slight spoilers if you need to be warned about that kind of thing.  
Pairings: 1+4 (friendship only).  
  
~-~-~-~-~-~-  
  
Pain was the first thing that registered in Heero's mind. Pain and the smell of blood. He lay still on the flat surface he was on and let his memory come back to him at its own pace.  
  
//Mission log: Left thruster damaged. Attitude control shot. I'm maneuvering with great difficulty...that's got to be the understatement of the year. I'm barely maneuvering at all.//  
  
He heard water, and then felt a cool touch on his arm as someone bathed the wound there.  
  
//Terrain rocky, visibility nearly nil. Heavy fog.//  
  
He smelled the familiar odor of antibiotic ointment and felt a cold finger spread it on the cleaned cut. His skin went numb where it was applied.  
  
//Abandoning Wing and going on foot. Smaller target. Terrain is extremely difficult.//  
  
He heard the sound of medical tape being torn and felt gentle pressure as a bandage was taped into place.  
  
//Cold, very cold...somehow my compass had gotten smashed. The sun didn't show through the damnable blinding fog. I have been shaken up so badly in that last skirmish that I've got absolutely no sense of direction. I think I'm lost.//  
  
His caretaker moved his arm so that it was by his side and drew some covers up to his shoulders. Water splashed, and then there was the touch of a warm cloth on his face as whoever it was began to wash the grime and dirt off his face.  
  
//Lost? How could I be lost?//  
  
"Can't remember," he murmured out loud.  
  
"It's okay. It isn't important right now." Said a very familiar voice. "I'm sure it'll come back to you in time."  
  
Heero cracked open his left eye and then, with some effort, his right. It didn't want to open all the way. "Zero-four?" He asked the blur of pastel colors--pink, yellow, blue--to his side.  
  
There was an impatient snort. "I'm sick of being a number. My name is Quatre Rebarba Winner, and if you don't call me Quatre, I'll give you another black eye to match that rather colorful shiner you've got." Quatre's actions belied his words as he washed it as gently as he could. Heero didn't feel much pain there, but that side of his face felt swollen and distorted.  
  
He remembered how he did that, at least. Part of his safety harness had come undone and he had had a hard time staying in his seat. "I banged my face on the view screen. I think I cracked it. The screen, that is, not my face"  
  
Quatre nodded. "Yeah, it's broken. It's okay, though, the Maguanacs can repair it."  
  
Heero wasn't sure he'd heard right. "The what?"  
  
"Maguanacs," Quatre enunciated the foreign word carefully. "It means 'family', and we're in their village. I'm an honorary member, and we're safe here." There was a curious note of pride in his voice.  
  
"They have Wing?"  
  
Quatre had finished washing Heero's face and began to pat it dry with a soft towel. "Yeah, it's in the underground repair facility with the other mobile suits. I'd be down there helping them, but I didn't want you to wake up alone in a strange place."  
  
Heero looked around the room as well as he could without moving his head too much. The walls were painted a light peach color and the furnishings seemed to be of genuine oak stained about the same color as Quatre's hair. The large, arched window was open and a fresh breeze made the sheer white curtains billow out. It was a nice room, he decided.  
  
"Do you want something to drink?"  
  
Heero rolled his tongue around in his mouth. It tasted dusty and stale. "Yeah."  
  
Quatre helped him sit up and handed him a glass of some garishly pink juice. He drank the sweet, unfamiliar liquid thirstily.  
  
"It's watermelon juice," Quatre answered the unasked question. "We grow fruit and vegetables and flowers in our hydroponics labs." He grinned. "The girls wanted to bring you flowers, but I wasn't sure if you'd object or not."  
  
Heero wondered why he would object. "I don't mind flowers...except red roses." He said, remembering Treize's odd fascination with those particular blooms.  
  
"I don't think any of us care for red roses these days," Quatre said, losing his grin. A look of irony crossed his face. "It's pretty pathetic when a war makes you think ill of an innocent flower."  
  
Heero's stomach loudly changed the topic for him, and Quatre laughed.  
  
"Somehow I knew you'd be hungry. I'll be right back." Quatre picked up the basin of water he's used to wash Heero's wounds and exited the room.  
  
Alone, Heero sank back on the pillows and let out the groan he'd been holding in since he'd awakened. He hurt pretty much all over. Carefully, he lifted the sheets and looked down at his naked body. His left kneecap was swollen and purple. His lower ribs were bandaged. Somehow he'd managed to cut his right foot. His shins were looking pretty bumpy and beat up. There was a heavy bandage around his upper right thigh.   
  
He let out a snort of disgust and covered himself back up. He felt slightly embarrassed that his host had seen him in this sorry state...but then he remembered that Quatre had most likely had his share of battle wounds himself. That thought didn't help much.  
  
The boy in question returned soon enough, carrying a large platter with him which he set down on a table beside the bed. "Have you ever had falafel before?"  
  
"Never heard of it."  
  
Quatre grinned at him. "You're in for a treat, then." He said, and showed Heero how to put the fried balls of chickpeas and spices into a folded piece of pita bread and garnish it with tahini, tomatoes, shredded cabbage and onion.  
  
Heero studied the rather messy concoction for a minute, and then took an experimental bite. The cool, fresh vegetables contrasted nicely with the spicy falafel balls and the piquant tahini. It beat the hell out of ration bars. "It's good," he concluded.  
  
"I thought you'd like it." Quatre said, biting into his rather neater sandwich. They chewed in comfortable silence for a while.  
  
"How did you find me, Quatre?" Heero asked at last. He didn't think the blond was serious about hitting him if he didn't address him by name, but somehow he thought it might be rude to call his host by his code number.  
  
"I didn't. I found Wing. I must have come in on the tail end of the fight that got you in this condition, and when I picked up the Gundanium on my sensors, I had to go investigate." He paused to wipe some tahini sauce from his mouth. "After that, it wasn't so hard to find you. You were trailing blood everywhere. It's a good thing it was so cold, or you would have bled to death."  
  
"I couldn't have lost that much." Heero objected. "I don't feel particularly weak or light-headed."  
  
Quatre shook his head, sending his bangs swinging back and forth across his forehead. "You lost quite a bit." He put down his sandwich and unbuttoned the left cuff of his shirt. Sliding the material up to his bicep, he showed Heero the band-aid on the crook of his arm. "Luckily we're the same type. You've got about half a liter of Vin de Winner in your veins."  
  
Heero forgot to eat. "You...you gave me your blood?"  
  
"Yeah, I did. Try to keep it in there, okay?"  
  
Heero tried not to gape, but he was having trouble processing the fact that the heir to the richest, most powerful family in space had just given him a transfusion of his own blood. He could accept the hospitality; that was a cultural thing. He could accept the first aid; Quatre had been trained in that. But to take of his own body? "I guess I owe you a thank you."  
  
"No problem," Quatre said casually, as if giving blood to a wounded comrade was something that he did every day. He popped the last of his falafel into his mouth, chewed it up, and then wiped his mouth. "I'll go check on Wing for you, then I need a nap. It's been kind of a long day."  
  
Heero nodded. "I understand. I'll see you later, I suppose"  
  
"Sure," Quatre said. He raised his hand to wave goodbye and then left, shutting the door carefully.  
  
~-~-~-~-~-~-  
  
It took the Maguanacs and Quatre a little less than a week to repair Wing; Heero himself took a bit longer to become mission-ready, but only by a few days. When he felt strong enough, Heero made his way to the underground repair bays and easily picked out Wing from amongst the ranks of the Maguanacs' sand-colored mechas. The white Gundam looked like it was in perfect shape, he noted with satisfaction, and he strode off to enter it.  
  
"They fixed everything." Said a familiar voice from his right. Heero spun around and faced the source of the voice, but he relaxed when he saw that it was Quatre.  
  
"Were you following me?" He asked suspiciously.  
  
"No, I just had some work to do here and it couldn't wait. I have an assignment to complete." Quatre stepped out of the shadows. He was wearing a dark green set of overalls and was wiping his hands on a shop rag; his ever-present goggles were shoved up on his forehead.  
  
"A mission?" Heero echoed. "Where and when?"  
  
The blond shook his head and smiled. "You know I can't tell you that." He dropped the rag on a nearby workbench. "Nor can you tell me about your mission, which is why I am assuming you're sneaking off in the middle of the night."  
  
"That isn't why I'm leaving," Heero said flatly.  
  
"No?"  
  
"No." Heero confirmed. "I need to go back to Doctor..." He winced at the slip of the tongue. "I need to go back to my base of operations now that I'm well."  
  
Quatre took a step back and bowed his head. "Understood. I should probably do the same."  
  
Heero nodded back at the blond and turned toward Wing. "Maybe we'll meet again, Zero-four." He said.  
  
"I think we will, Zero-one. Take care." And with that, Quatre stepped back into the darkness while Heero went back to Wing. 


	2. Reciprocation

Summary: You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers.  
  
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but the story is.  
Title: Blood Brothers, part 2/2  
Warnings: Language, blood, vomit, slight spoilers if you need to be warned about that kind of thing.  
Pairings: 1+4 (friendship only).  
  
~-~-~-~-~-~-  
  
The flash of light as the last of the Libra battleship disintegrated was almost beautiful, in spite of the act of destruction. Millions of particles scintillated white, gold, green, and blue as they hit the Earth's atmosphere and burned away to nothing. It was as if an enormous firework had been set off to signal the end of it all.  
  
Victory.  
  
Quatre didn't need to hear the word to know that it was true; the very air was resonating with it. Victory. He smiled in spite of his pain. "Victory." He said the word out loud and decided he liked the sound of it.  
  
"Is it worth it?" Asked a cool voice over his com link.  
  
Quatre thought about it as he shut down his cockpit systems and unbuckled his safety harness. The Earth would eventually heal itself. The colonies and their resource satellites could be rebuilt. The soldiers could be absorbed into normal society. All of that could be reversed...but nothing could bring back the lives of the nearly 100,000 people who had been killed over the past year. "No, Trowa, I guess it's not worth it," he said grimly. "But at least it's over now."  
  
"For the time being," Trowa said.  
  
Quatre snorted. "Now you're beginning to sound like Dorothy."  
  
"She made sense, in a twisted sort of way. It seems to be part of human nature to fight each other." The voice over the com link sounded dull and flat.  
  
"Trowa, you're going to make yourself crazy if you keep thinking like that. Just let it go." Unthinkingly, Quatre reached up with his left hand to open Sandrock's hatch release and felt fresh blood flow down his side as he wound re-opened. He cursed softly.  
  
"Are you all right?" Trowa's voice sounded alarmed.  
  
"Yeah, I--" He closed his eyes tightly and tried to will the dizziness and nausea away. The smell of blood was beginning to get to him. He took a step forward and nearly gagged as the blood pooled in the feet of his flight suit made a sickening squishing sound. "I think I need a hand here."  
  
He stood still, eyes closed, and waited until he felt Trowa's arm around his waist before opening them. "Christ, Quatre, you're white as a ghost. Why didn't you come back here after we got out of the control room?"  
  
"_Somebody_ had to watch your back after you ran out of ammunition," Quatre said testily. He winced as Trowa's arm tightened around him, and their feet left the magnetized hatch of the Gundam. They drifted slowly and silently to the floor of the hangar. Quatre closed his eyes again when the nausea threatened to overwhelm him; it just wouldn't do to throw up on one of his best friends, and especially not in null gravity where cleanup would be a nightmare.  
  
"Well, it didn't need to be somebody who just had a fencing foil through the spleen. You have all the self-preservation instincts of a clinically depressed lemming, you know that, don't you?" Trowa sounded annoyed, which made the blond smile. An annoyed Trowa was better than a morose Trowa.  
  
"What's going on here?" Demanded a hard voice from somewhere to their left. Quatre risked opening his eyes and took in a sweaty shock of dark brown hair, a pair of intense blue eyes, and a mouth that was set in a thin, hard line.  
  
"Hi, Heero. Nice shot."  
  
Heero ignored the flippant greeting. "You're hurt."  
  
"That Catalonia bitch went crazy and ran him through with her foil," Trowa explained in a harsh tone. "I thought I'd gotten the bleeding under control, but it must have opened up when we were destroying the Libra."  
  
Quatre blinked a few times; his vision was starting to go dark grey around the edges. "No, it opened up while I was shutting down Sandrock. It was my fault." The greyness of his vision changed abruptly to black. "Could one of you take me to Sally? I feel really, really..." He never did get to finish the sentence; the cold blackness swallowed everything up and he slumped bonelessly between his two comrades as his body finally succumbed to his wound.  
  
~-~-~-~-~-~  
  
There was the sound of snoring, which was odd. Quatre was pretty sure that he didn't snore, especially not when he was awake. He cracked open one eye and briefly took in the dull white walls of the sickroom before he found the source of the snoring. "Heero?"  
  
The boy in the chair snapped awake instantly and put one hand to the small of his back-reaching for a gun, presumably. "What is it?"  
  
Quatre opened his mouth to ask one of the many questions that were floating around inside his head, nagging him, but the nest of snakes that suddenly materialized in his belly changed his mind. So instead of asking where the others were and how they were doing, he said, "I'm going to throw up."  
  
Unfazed, the dark-haired boy merely got up from his hard metal chair and went to a supply cabinet in the corner of the room. He took a white plastic bag from one of the drawers and kicked himself over to where Quatre lay, cold sweat now beading up on his brow, and offered it to him. "It's the anesthetic that's making you sick," Heero explained as Quatre heaved up everything he'd eaten in the past week. "They had to operate. The foil nicked your small intestine a little, but there won't be any permanent damage. You were extremely lucky."  
  
"Lucky?" Quatre said flatly between heaves. "Yeah, I feel really lucky."  
  
A corner of Heero's mouth turned up in a bitter smile. "A little higher, and the wound would have punctured a lung. A few inches lower, and you'd spend the rest of your life hauling around a colostomy bag. I'd say you were lucky."  
  
"Well, since you put it that way..." Quatre spit one last time into the white plastic bag and sealed the top. He tried to pitch it toward the red biohazard receptacle near the supply cabinet, but something tugged at his arm, restraining him. "What the-"  
  
"It's your IV line," Heero explained, taking the offending bag away and dealing with it himself. "You _did_ lose a lot of blood."  
  
Blinking through the lingering anesthetic haze, Quatre looked at the needle in his arm, then up at the bag of blood hanging on a rack over his bed. "It's yours, isn't it?"  
  
Heero inclined his head slightly. "I thought I'd repay your favor from earlier."  
  
"So," Quatre said with a smile as a thought struck him, "we've gone from being brothers in arms to brothers in blood."  
  
"Brothers..." The dark-haired boy said the word slowly, testing the word out. His brow furrowed a bit as he got used to the idea. "Yes, I suppose we're brothers now, in a sense."  
  
"You don't have to be born into the same family to be brothers. Anyway..." Quatre winced as he shifted into a slightly less uncomfortable position. "I'm honored to have the soul of outer space as a brother."  
  
"That's the second time you've called me that, Quatre," Heero said, raising an eyebrow. "What do you mean by it?"  
  
"It's a little hard to explain, and you'll probably think I'm crazy." The blond licked his dry lips and paused to find the right words. "It's an intuition I have about you. I believe that when you took the name Heero Yuy, you didn't take _only_ the name, you accepted the spirit of the man who used to lead the Colonies. That spirit is the soul of outer space, and I believe that it has the power to help unite the Colonies and the Earth."  
  
Heero stood silent for a moment, but then he shook his head and smiled a little. "You believe some pretty weird things, Quatre."  
  
The blond grinned back. "Maybe I do, but my intuitions are rarely wrong. And besides, haven't stranger things than that happened lately?"  
  
They had. There was no denying the fact. "We do live in interesting times." Heero admitted. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. "So, if I have taken on the soul of outer space, then I'm meant to see to it that peace is preserved?"  
  
"Yes," Quatre said around a yawn. Although the anesthetic was beginning to fade, he was getting very sleepy. "I mean, we all do, of course, but I have the feeling that you have much more to give than you think."  
  
Heero took a deep, quiet breath. "I don't know about that, and I can't say that I really believe in your intuitions, but I'll tell you one thing: I've been fighting for this peace for as long as I can remember, and I'll be damned if I let anything get in the way of it now."  
  
The blond smiled crookedly. "Spoken like a true brother. I always suspected you were a pacifict at heart." Although his tone was joking, his words were sincere. He thought he saw some of the glacial coldness melt from Heero's dark blue eyes.  
  
"You may be right about that." Heero said thoughtfully. "Time will tell, I suppose. Speaking of time," he said, glancing up at the clock over the door, "I'd better let you get some sleep. Good night, brother in arms, in blood, and in soul. I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of work ahead of us." Heero kicked himself toward the door and let himself out.  
  
~~~THE BEGINNING~~~ 


End file.
